make a list

sun in the eye
something sweet and peppery
pieces of a board game
wood tiled disruption

send instructions leaving out each noun

using prepositions, adverbs, exclamation
no commas only disrupt the continuous

a scratched memory repeats
rock ledge crumbling
reflection curved
a glimpse falters

more great Stein quotes

“Poetry and Grammar” (from Lectures in America in Stein writings 1932-46)

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.

Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not. All this has so much to do with grammar and with poetry and with prose.
Words have to do everything in poetry and prose and some writers write more in articles and prepositions and some say you should write in nouns, and of course one has to think of everything. (313)

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. (314)

Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean. (322)

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph, examples of this I have been reading to you. (326)

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (327)

imply.

your silence by which I mean
there is no eye contact

a tattered ball
night giggling
mud scented

intend.

it is unclear by which I mean
I try turning in each direction
and yet

yellow light
a waxing moon
at all hours
or a shared taste sweet
and salty

indiscretion.

by which I mean
every possibility

against smooth
against skin
against thinking for a moment
outside of this

more Stein

“Lecture 1” from Narration (Selections Ed. Joan Retallack)

It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative t make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to e was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. (293)

So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. (295)

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. (300)

from "My Debt to Books"

by Gertrude Stein

So many books have been important to me, it is like the man who said about automobiles when some one asked him is that mark a good one, all automobiles are good, some might go better than others but they all go, and that is the way books are to me, any book that I can read at all is important to me and I can read most of them, each one does something to me, you have to read a lot of books if you are going to read all your life and read at least five or six books a week, you can read them over and over again but even so it does take a good many if you begin when you are very young and you live a reasonably long life.

intuitional transfer, a geographical space, topographic concerns relate to an array of condensation (emotionally speaking). these things I offer in response: catalyst or cataclysm. each photo a design specific to internal conflict, blurring scenes interrupted by color, fragments of lines, framed monotony of landscape nonetheless in constant flux.

what I will tell you is this: each implication like a gravel floor, shifts underfoot. specific pebbles stuck between toes or in the crevasses of the soles of my shoes. the dry dusty pattern of comprehension gets muddy in the rain.

this space, filled with the sound of cars and industry, hints toward complete isolation, outside of...then turns away entirely. a continuum of populated reflection.

a wildflower, and endangered plant, a trail closed for restoration. the dog wanders. seconds filled with detail, scent of rotted something in the freezer, a cool humid breeze brushes dry foothills. she sniffs, sticks her head all the way in. i tell you this is not like it ever was. returning to the same but completely changed. this other me. a distant imagined you. the dog, like the path, seems to intuit direction. morning evening birds, this isn't the desert at all. rocks underfoot, I am thinking that there was a moment when I would have wondered otherwise. but in this, exactly, there is no other present. no example of a replaced moment. a dog sleeps under the desk and nothing has happened, not before I thought you existed, nor is there momentum toward a future struggle. it is this. two dogs jump under the showers of a garden hose. one dog watches. one dog sleeps. the image stands still with no purpose. that is the lesson.

1.
Can you dare encounter each detail, a personality, in relation, a situation. We are all in context. She wandered across the room: grey carpet, grey walls, the scent she remembered used to waft through hallways, mingle over letters received from far away. An earlier comfortable moment, that is, in terms of not knowing so little for so long. How to relate each feeling encountered, that is, shredded fingernails, hair tightly curled, blemished skin. That is, an inability to process emotion. Temperament. Holes in the wall. Self flagellation. Verbal abuse from the inside out.

2.
Describe your own specific location:

Concrete. Moving layers of human built not nature. Planned, usable, landscaped. Wild Detroit. Birds, overgrowth, taking over empty lots, spaces, wildlife call it home. Crumbled sidewalks covered in weeds. New gardens using space among impromptu wilderness.

3.
What's your story?

4.
History of economic turmoil. Disturbed dreams of suburbia. Fleeing city grounds. Undone. History of mixed emotion. Stay. Leave. Stranded. Abandoned and crumbling. History of a city full of profit. Lingers in shadows of monuments: an old train station, high ceilings, frescoes. What grows around in through. Write your story. Years of sediment. Emotional rubble. Graffiti consequences. Art in public where once stood capitalism's empire. The auto center of industry. The self(identity) in context. History of emotional abandon. Grey.

revolt is continuous
the space of a body in space
pieces cohere, dissolve, calculate
coins, instruction, an orange hue
wafting
smooth tones linger
wasting precariously
why imagine any
future
refuse
choice

number the sections in order to tell
truth grey mist
every day is otherwise
but need
fake photos fake plants
remember
blue sky decorated streets characters
colored in crayon
outlines
striped
hold distance at length
with or without lyrics
chords vibrate
decades the false progression
looping each nervous intention
scared scarred diverge
neatly censored (sensory) concrete
seeps

mostly inhibit decline rancor aggressive viral or a stairway
of iron tells otherwise, choose a word write it in parts one
section after another list pleasure weighted over a list

cat crawl spiral iron
mint ice in summer
bowling after hours

can you this page cut at the edge missing words display
a new sparkle, or pretend, at least walking one distance

or another
focus each line